Safe and Secure Public Transport in Delhi: Project Completion Report

Despite growing recognition of the need for gender mainstreaming in urban transport, there remains a significant gap in creating gender equitable public transport systems. This gap largely results from public transport authorities’ reliance on gender-blind data, which excludes insights into women and girls’ travel behaviour from effective planning and service provision.

Traditional data sources, such as household surveys and census data, often fail to capture the dynamic nature of public transport usage. This project highlights the critical role of data in addressing these service gaps to enhance the safety and reliability of public transport for women and girls. The initiative focuses on electric buses, capitalizing on the ongoing transition of Indian cities toward electric buses. The project employed a two-pronged approach.

The first phase involved identifying gaps through literature reviews, primary surveys with female commuters, and focus group discussions with depot staff. A global review of public transport ticketing data revealed that gender-disaggregated data is either not collected or, if collected, is not effectively used to address service gaps from a gendered perspective. Literature widely supports that a multifaceted approach, similar to the Guardian project in London, is effective in addressing safety concerns. This phase also included analysing the knowledge and behaviour of public transport frontline staff regarding the safety of female commuters.

The second phase focused on implementing recommendations based on empirical evidence and evaluating the impact of these interventions.